Metal structure houses Pathe's historic archive

This bulbous metal <span class="s2">structure squeezing its way into a tiny Paris courtyard is the new headquarters of the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, home to French film company Pathé's historic archives. "We started with a square box, but found this organic shape responded much better to the constraints of the space," explains principal architect <span class="s3">Thorsten Sahlmann.

A hand-drawn concept sketch of the Pathe archive

Renzo Piano

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After the building was digitally designed by the Paris office of architects Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the courtyard was re-measured and found to be 60cm smaller. Fortunately, the designers didn't have to go back to the drawing board. "We just changed the parameters for the width of the site and the model auto-recreated the whole form," says Sahlmann.

The same went for the 7,000 perforated aluminium panels that cover the exterior. "Each is a slightly different shape," says Sahlmann.

Beneath these panels, the building is made up of a concrete shell, created by spraying the concrete on to a shaped <span class="s3">metal mesh and suspended above the ground by 70 posts.

The windowless lower floors of the building serve as a film archive and cinema, with the top-floor offices set beneath a huge curved glass skylight. "Curved glass is much stiffer than usual glass, so we had to make sure that any movement of the structure doesn't hurt it," says Sahlmann. "This has never been done on such a scale in France before."

This article was first published in the November 2014 issue of WIRED magazine